“This area is not reliable at night,” he repeated.
“But what does that mean? Are there bandits or what?”
“I cannot say what might happen. This area is not reliable. We cannot camp out. I am sorry I did not bring a gun.”
“What should we do?” I was looking around at the landscape, trying to see it as menacing. It still looked exactly the same to me. I was having a conversation behind our bus with a military man, and it bore no relation to any reality that I could see. He was telling me we were at risk, and I couldn’t see why.
“Well,” I said, “don’t you think, if we pulled way off the road somewhere, pulled a few miles off the road, we could camp out and it would be all right?”
“We cannot camp out.” His voice was flat. He pointed to the cars rushing by on the highway. “None of these cars will camp out. By the time the road is dark, they will all be in safety.”
“What can we do?”
“I do not want to alarm your friends. There is a military base about fifteen kilometers back, at Chilas,” he said. “We can try there.”
Now I was beginning to understand. He needed someone to inform the others of this plan. “We can try there?”
He shrugged. “It will be very full tonight. Perhaps they will turn us away, but I don’t think so, because you are foreigners.”
“Okay,” I said. I went and told the others that Major Shan suggested that we would be more comfortable spending the night at the army base, fifteen kilometers back, than we would be camping out.
No one argued. It turned out the army base at Chilas was a hundred kilometers back, and by the time we got there the night was inky dark. As the major had predicted, the base was packed, barracks and dormitories filled to overflowing; in our bus headlights we saw travelers sleeping on porches, in their cars, everywhere. By the time we found the headquarters and roused someone, and by the time they sent us to an unused visiting-commandant’s cottage, it was nearly 11:00 p.m. Exhausted, we pulled our sleeping bags off the bus and slept on the floor. Later on another busload of foreigners showed up. They slept upstairs; I didn’t wake to see them.
* * *
We departed at six the next morning. The landscape now seemed cheerfully sunny and empty; we were certain to reach Hunza today, landslide or not. Retracing our steps, we passed the gas station, and once more rejoined the Indus River Gorge. We felt, if anything, disappointed in the adventure just concluded. We had imagined ourselves at risk from bandits or robbers, and saved at the last moment; there was excitement in the fantasy, and obviously there would be no further excitement on the trip.
Then we arrived at the landslide.
I was completely unprepared for its scale. It was a half-mile wide and three-quarters of a mile long, a single sheer, sloping incline of loose sand that ran from the top of the mountains, far above the road, down to the river far below. Millions of tons of loose sand.
“No wonder they didn’t clear this in two days,” somebody said.
“They are usually very good,” Major Shan said, “but this, I think, will be a week. You see how the people deal with it: the trucks and buses from Hunza come as far as the other side, and the trucks from Islamabad come this far, and the people walk across and take another truck or bus on the other side.”
I could hardly see to the other side, it was so far away.
We were going to have to walk across.
I saw people walking, tiny dwarfed figures on the great sandy incline. They were walking in both directions, on little footpaths hacked into the incline. It was proper terrain for a mountain goat.
I watched this and had a sudden sinking feeling. It was going to be immensely dangerous to cross this landslide, as treacherous as crossing an ice field. I had not signed up for danger on this trip and had just survived what I considered a pleasurable fantasy—bandits, in an area not reliable at night. I was not ready for a real danger, particularly such a mundane one.
Died in a landslide in Pakistan. What a dreary, embarrassing end to my life. And it wouldn’t even be understandable to people back home.
You mean he was buried under a landslide?
Oh no, nothing like that. This landslide had already occurred a few days before, and he was walking over it, and he fell down into the river and drowned.
Drowned?
Well, he was swept away. Never found the body.
He was tall. Didn’t have good balance, if I recall.
No. I guess not.
I didn’t like the sound of any of this.
Meanwhile, on the landslide itself, there was a great deal of activity on the slopes. A couple of hundred yards above the walkers, bulldozers, which looked like little yellow toys, worked to clear the slide. Then, too, every few minutes the army would detonate an explosion, and the ground would shake, and a plume of rock and dust would puff into the air. Through all this chaos, the people agilely stepped across the great steep, shifting, sandy pile. Every so often a big boulder or a small landslide would rush down the incline at the people, but they moved aside and let it crash on down to the river.
I watched, and I knew I could not make it across.
Cut his trip short, I hear.
Oh, really?
Yeah, he got way the hell out in Pakistan and there was some sort of little mudslide, or I don’t know what, and he panicked. Freaked out. Had to go home.
I was watching the landslide with Major Shan. I offered him a cigarette. I said, “Will we be able to get across?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “You see how all the people cross.”
“I know,” I said, “but we have some older people in our party.…”
“I will help the old ones.”
“And there may be some who are afraid.”
“I will help them, too.”
“Yes, good … Uh …”
He looked at me expectantly. There wasn’t much I could do but tell the truth.
“I don’t know if I can make it.”
The words seemed to hang in the air, an awkward confession.
Major Shan stared at me for a long time.
He finished the cigarette in silence, then ground it out on the road.
“You can make it,” he said.
He was right. There was nothing to do but get across, and I did. It was hair-raising, my heart was pounding, I was terrified, but I managed it.
While I was crossing, one of the others in our party took pictures. But the pictures didn’t really show anything. In the pictures it doesn’t look dangerous, or even very interesting. But it was the most dangerous thing I had ever done.
Two days later I was approaching Baltit, the capital city of Hunza. Even though I did not believe the stories about Hunzakuts, as the local people are called, now that I was here, it was impossible not to wonder: the claims for the place were so extravagant.
In fable, the mountain kingdom of Hunza had been populated by the descendants of Persian soldiers in the army of Alexander the Great, who conquered India in 327 B.C. This was cited to explain the beauty of the tall, fair-skinned Hunzakuts, as well as their excellent physiques and military prowess. The Hunzakuts were far more intelligent than the neighboring bandit tribes; they enjoyed extraordinarily robust health, whether from life at high altitude, from their simple healthy diet of apricots and wheat, from their unhurried life, or for some other reason. Their social life is healthy as well; the Mir settled the rare disputes that arose in his kingdom.
A group of children came running to greet us. I was struck by how scraggly and unattractive they were. Here a mixture of ethnic origins—Chinese, Persian, Afghani, Mongol—led not to a beautiful blending, but to a stunted, deformed pack of mongrels. In this fabled land of self-sufficiency, the children clutched at our clothing, begging to sell us locally mined garnets. I inspected a few dirty fists; they held gems of poor quality.
In the villages themselves, I looked for the fabulously old people, but saw none. There was disease and poverty, and signs of a harsh mounta
in life on all sides: genetic defects, evidence of inbreeding, cataracts, rashes, infections, running sores.
However, Hunza’s physical setting was captivating, a little principality of green terraced fields nestled in a bowl of high, snow-streaked mountains, with the Hunza River running through the center. Above the town rose a whitewashed fortress, its siting spectacular. But the fortress was disused, its windows broken, its white façade peeling.
Hunza was once an autonomous mountain state, one of a string of feudal nations across the Himalaya that included Swat, Ladakh, Nagir, Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan. In the nineteenth century, the British supported these states as a buffer between India and powerful neighbors to the north—Russia and China. For centuries, these little nations remained cut off from the world, inaccessible in the mountains, and forbidden to foreigners. Elaborate myths grew up around them.
The British briefly conquered Hunza in 1891, after the Hunza bandit attacks on caravans began to get out of hand, even by the standards of that lawless corner of the world. But the British allowed Hunza to retain her independence. Now the Pakistani government wanted to take over these independent mountain states. Their procedure was simple: they waited until the Mir died, and then did not allow him to be succeeded. The last Mir of Hunza had died two years before; the Pakistani government took over the country and opened it to tourism.
So we were seeing the shell of a former state, the remnants of what once had been. We stayed in Hunza two nights. It was peaceful and beautiful, particularly at sunset, when the valleys, already in shadow, glowed in the light reflected from the mountain peaks. But it was not the Shangri-La of imagination.
From Hunza we went to the Hopar Valley in the adjacent kingdom of Nagir. In fable, the Nagyri have been as much despised as the Hunzakuts have been idealized. The Nagyri are said to be darker, weaker, frailer, and more depraved than the Hunzakuts. The Nagyri are unsanitary, ungracious, and unpleasant. You know you are in Nagir, say the Hunzakuts, because there are so many flies.
As is often the case with neighboring states, the people and ways of life appear virtually identical to an outsider. It is proximity that causes competition, and a natural human tendency to consider all bad traits as located on the other side of the valley.
At Nagir, we camped in a beautiful valley alongside the Bualtar Glacier. I had never seen a glacier before, and I found it quite remarkable, a frozen river of stone. To the naked eye, there appeared to be no ice at all. There were simply two vertical canyon walls of dried mud, and in the middle, between them, this flowing, riverine shape of gray rock. Nagir has many glaciers, including the Hispar—forty miles long, the second-largest in the world outside the polar caps. But the Bualtar was a small, rather tame-looking glacier.
One day our trip leader, Dick Irvin, Loren, and I decided to hike on the glacier. Loren and I were both glad for the excursion; during our stay at this lovely campsite, some unspoken tension had increased between us, which was incongruous in the beautiful setting. I felt there was something on Loren’s mind, but I was reluctant to ask her. When I finally did, she just shook her head and insisted she was fine. Yet the tension remained.
So it was good to spend a day on the glacier; I found it a fascinating environment—a little slippery in places, windy, and very cold, which seemed peculiar after the stifling heat of camp. But, following the initial surprise, the glacier proved rather featureless, just a great frozen river covered with rock, and after an hour we grew tired of hiking. Dick, a much stronger hiker, decided to walk on. Loren and I headed back to camp.
We had climbed down onto the glacier on a gentle, sloping trail, but it was a circuitous route and added an extra mile of walking. If we were willing to climb the earthen cliffs, we could go directly back to camp. There were trails going up the cliffs, and we had seen shepherds driving goats up these cliffs, so we knew the trails were passable.
We picked a suitable trail and started climbing. The cliffs were fairly sheer, crumbling dirt. But the trail was easily three feet wide; it wasn’t difficult to climb for the first hundred feet of ascent. I often stopped to look back at the glacier as we rose higher and higher above it.
Then the trail became a little steeper, the path a little narrower. I was uncomfortable, and I stopped looking back, but fixed my attention on the trail. Still, we were already halfway up, and it seemed sensible to keep going.
The trail deteriorated. Pretty soon it was less than a foot wide, a mere track in the crumbly earth, and occasionally it gave way underfoot. There weren’t many handholds in the sheer dirt walls of the cliffs; and no vegetation to grab on to, so these little collapses were frightening. There were many gaps in the trail, where the ground had broken away before.
As we ascended, the gaps grew wider. They were occasionally two feet wide, then three feet wide. They were difficult to step across—especially since you had no assurance that the earth on the far side of the gap would hold and not give way.
We were now two hundred feet up. Another hundred feet and we would reach the upper surface, and camp. We kept going.
The trail was now very narrow. In most places we had to hug the rock wall, pushing our bodies against the warm dirt, as we moved up the trail. It was more and more difficult to proceed.
And then the trail stopped.
At some time in the past, it had broken away, and there was now a gap of at least six feet between where I stood and where the trail resumed. I was standing with my body flat against the wall. There was hardly any room to stand. There was no room for me to turn around. I was two hundred feet in the air on a narrow trail on an earthen cliff and I was stuck.
I am afraid of heights. I wanted to scream.
“Why have you stopped?” Loren asked. She was behind me, on the trail. She couldn’t see anything; my body blocked her view.
“There’s no trail.”
“What do you mean, there’s no trail?”
“I mean, there’s an open gap ahead of me, about six feet wide.”
“Can you get across it?”
“No, I can’t get across it!” I was becoming panicky.
“Let me see,” Loren said. “Maybe I can do it.”
“I can’t move,” I said. “And anyway, I’m telling you, you can’t do it, either.”
“Just move your body a little; let me see.”
I moved my chest away from the rock a few inches, so she could peer through to the gap in the trail ahead. I was starting to sweat.
“It’s wide,” she said. “Too wide for me.”
“Can we go back down?” I asked. I couldn’t see; her body blocked the trail down.
“Too steep,” she said. It is much easier to go up a steep, narrow trail than down it.
“Then we can’t go up and we can’t go down.”
“Yeah.”
I was seriously fighting panic now. I had one of those momentary visions—like a near miss in a traffic accident. This is how it’s going to happen. Nothing dramatic, no great incident, nothing so big as the landslide. Just a little day hike from camp in Nagir, they somehow took the wrong route back, got nervous, fell off the trail. We first suspected something when they failed to turn up for lunch.…
“Somehow we have to get across it,” she said.
“I can’t get across it,” I said to her. “We have to go back down.”
“I can’t go down,” she said, “and I know you can’t.”
And there we were, and there we stayed, frozen for the next few minutes. I don’t know how it would have turned out if we hadn’t heard a voice say, “What seems to be the trouble?”
It was Dick Irvin. He’d already crossed the glacier, and was on his way back. He’d noticed us climbing the cliffs and had decided to follow.
I was never so glad to see anyone in my life.
“There’s no trail, Dick,” I told him, trying not to whine.
“No problem,” he said. And somehow—I am not clear on the details—he managed to move past us, and I watched him kick a toehol
d in the dirt halfway across the gap, and he leapt lightly across, and from the other side he held out his walking stick, and he got first me and then Loren across the six-foot gap. Then Dick led us on up the trail. My body was shaking. I was soaked in sweat. My vision seemed greenish and too bright. There were several more gaps in the trail, but Dick got us past them all, somehow.
When we reached the top, I felt dizzy and had to sit down. Dick went on to camp to check on lunch. I sat on the ground and thought I might throw up. Loren kept asking me if I was all right. I said I was, but I wasn’t. I didn’t eat lunch; I wasn’t hungry.
In the late afternoon, when it was cooler, Loren suggested we go for a walk. We moved along the rim of the valley, looking over the town and the terraced fields. In this remote pastoral setting, we found ourselves talking about our plans for the future, our hopes for our lives when we returned home. Standing here in a grove of apricot trees above the Hopar Valley, we talked about having a family and working and about our plans, which were, it became increasingly clear, not shared plans but individual plans. The seriousness of this conversation made us both very calm and polite. Neither of us was willing yet to say the marriage was over, but that prospect hung in the cool afternoon air. Finally we began talking about dinner, and how hungry we were, and we went back to the camp.
The next morning we got back into the jeeps, and started the long trip back to Islamabad. When we got to the landslide, the road had been cleared.
Sharks
“Have you dived in the pass yet?” the proprietor of the hotel asked the first evening, when we told him that we liked the diving.
“No,” we said, “not yet.”
“Ah,” he said. “You must dive the pass. It is the most exciting dive on Rangiroa.”
“Why is that?”
“The swiftness of the current, and also there are many fish.”
“Sharks?” someone asked.
Travels Page 26
